HYCOOL-IT is a three-year EU-funded project whose main objective is to develop innovative solutions, both digital and technical, to enable more efficient integration and operation of IT server rooms in advanced tertiary buildings, focusing the development on their replicability through standardisation.

This project plans to develop advanced digitised technical equipment solutions through BDT SimBOTs (interactive simulators) in the ICT Ecosystem, which will optimise the operation of intelligent server rooms in all the buildings where these developments will take place. At the same time, a highly innovative rack-integrated absorption chiller for server cooling powered by waste heat will be developed and implemented to perform efficient liquid cooling of IT servers and to provide cooling of the server room itself in a compact, autonomous, and cost-effective way.

The overall project foresees to implement hybrid cooling systems by recovering the waste heat produced by the IT rooms located in the tertiary buildings. The BDTE (Building Digital Twin Environment) will be developed as a PaaS with its specific communication microservices to connect waste heat that will produce cooling and will also serve to integrate into heating utility networks.

The growing trend of electricity consumption in data centres reflecting the EU tertiary sector presents an exponential growth in demand for intelligent server rooms to service and support their critical information technology (IT) applications and their intelligent management. The main challenge of this project will be to demonstrate the feasibility of generating and maintaining a digital twin of both the IT server room and the entire building.

All developments in this project will be aimed at addressing the main problem currently faced by data centres in large enterprises, school districts, hospitals and universities or other buildings with a need to augment their server rooms. The ‘key’ objective of this project is the integration of a design, which will improve and optimise the thermal management of the enormous energy consumption of such buildings while maintaining the precision cooling of equipment or CRAC (computer room air conditioning) units to operate 24 hours a day, throughout their lifetime.